Jeff Sessions’ gobbledygook; Mueller perseveres

“The meeting some say occurred, and may have occurred, but if it occurred, I don’t remember that it did.”

–Jeff Sessions, on the third Mayflower Hotel meeting with Kislyak [quote noted by me from televised hearing, 6/13/17]

Jeff Sessions says it’s “an appalling and a detestable lie” to insinuate that he helped Trump collude with Russia or did anything improper, but there are holes in his explanation, and they’re not little holes, they’re the kind of Florida sinkholes that swallow houses.

Time after time at his Senate Intelligence Committee hearing, Sessions wouldn’t answer questions about private conversations he had with Trump. He didn’t formally invoke “executive privilege,” so we now appear to have at least two different levels of stonewalling for this administration: 1) authentic executive privilege (which actually doesn’t exist in the Constitution or in law), and 2) a Jenny Craiged version of executive privilege—slimmed down, petite-sized—in which Session asserts he doesn’t want to talk about his chats with the president because—well, because he doesn’t want to, and what are you gonna do about it, nyah nyah nyah?

Well, what we can do is infer what’s going on, and that is: Collusion. The reason there’s no smoking gun, yet, is because this administration is walling off access to every conceivable smoking gun. Trump won’t release his taxes. That could be—not a smoking gun, but a mushroom cloud. Trump won’t divest from his worldwide business interests, which even Republicans know are unsavory; we now know that the uber-rich people who are buying his real estate are doing so through shell companies, anonymously, so that their ties to the Trumps and Kushners can’t be looked into.

So we have Sessions refusing to tell us the real reason Comey was fired, and what really went on in the talks between two public servants—Trump and Sessions—who are paid by us taxpayers, which conversations we have a right to know about.

I’m annoyed by this notion of closed sessions and “can’t discuss private conversations” and executive privilege and the general secrecy and obfuscation surrounding so much of what this government does–Republicans and Democrats. Why, for instance, are we told certain things aren’t suitable for public consumption? I’m not talking about revealing the names of spies, I mean simple stuff. How come Comey pleaded executive privilege when he was asked, “Was the FBI able to confirm any criminal allegations contained in the Steele document [i.e. the ‘dossier’]?” How come DNI director Dan Coats demanded a closed session when asked if Trump asked him to slow down the FBI investigation? Why can’t we know these things? Are we, the public, too stupid?

Sessions isn’t asking for closed sessions, he’s not invoking executive privilege; he’s saying he won’t answer anything at all. Period, end of story: a new standard of suborning of justice. What we’re seeing is the script of the coverup written before our very eyes. Reread that gobbledygook quote I opened with. “If it occurred.” It’s bullcrap. What Sessions really meant was: Yes, there was a third meeting with Kislyak, but I’m not going to admit it, and if the Senate Intelligence Committee thinks it can prove there was, they can bloody well go ahead and try.

If Comey or Coats or Sessions or others testify in closed session, we still have public servants — senators from both sides of the political aisle — in those meetings.

Public servants sworn to carry out their oath of office. (Including partisans who have no desire to fall on the proverbial sword for anyone in our presidential administration.)

Public servants quite willing to leak information to the news media on uncovered nefarious dealings.

(Aside: what a revelation, that the former head of the FBI is an admitted press leaker. The precedent? Watergate’s “Deep Throat” [*] Mark Felt, who was the Associate Director of the FBI.)

So I have a more sanguine view that the truth will be revealed. Be patient and let our constitutional process work.

[*Cocktail party trivia: according to his Wikipedia entry citing his first memoir titled “The FBI Pyramid,” Felt asserts that Richard Nixon knew his identity as “Deep Throat.” Yet Nixon did not fire him.]